At the 2017 Adobe MAX—Adobe's creativity conference—the software firm gave a sneak preview of new technology they are currently working on incorporating into their products. Nothing got filmmakers more excited than Cloak, a feature that allows you to erase unwanted elements in video footage. Essentially, it's Photoshop Content-Aware Fill for video.

Forgot to remove a tripod out of the frame or annoyed by a stain on an actor's shirt? In a 6-minute demo, Adobe showed how seamlessly these elements can be stripped from a video clip. It's an incredible advance, as doing such work would typically require editing each frame of the video individually, something that is not only time consuming, but incredibly difficult to do consistently.

Advances in motion-tracking technology have helped in the development of Cloak, which is also aided by the fact that in video, there are often many angles of the same area—helping fill in the blanks. “We can do really dense tracking, using parts of the scene as they become visible,” shares Adobe research engineer Geoffrey Oxholm. “That gives you something you can use to fill in.”

During the demonstration, Adobe showed how a street lamp blocking the view of a stunning cathedral could easily be stripped out, as well as the more subtle removal of a backpack chest strap from a man walking across a scene. They even erased the couple entirely from the hiking scene with a fairly impressive result. Of course, the technology is still in development and no announcement has been made as to when—or if—it will be incorporated into a software release, but surely they wouldn't tease us without having a plan. All we can do now is wait anxiously and hope it doesn't take long to arrive.

Adobe previewed a new feature, Cloak, which allows you to edit virtually anything out of video footage with just a few clicks.

Simply create a mask around the object you'd like to remove, and Cloak does the rest.

It's so powerful, you can even edit people entirely out of the video.

Watch these demonstrations of how Cloak—which is like Photoshop Content-Aware Fill for video—works.